Madoff's wife living in Boca condo with her sister

August 17, 2011|By Donna Gehrke-White, Sun Sentinel

Ruth Madoff is living in Boca Raton with her older sister and brother-in-law, Joan and Robert Roman, who let her stay with them despite being fleeced by her husband, convicted Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, according to media reports and public records.

Robert Roman owns a condo, assessed at $250,000 at the upscale, gated Broken Sound community in Boca, public records show. Madoff used the condo's address to register her new 2011 Honda Civic. She had been driving a 1996 Infiniti.

Earlier this year, Inside Edition broadcast a videotape of her shopping at a Boca grocery and driving off in the Infiniti. She has dyed her hair ginger instead of blond, People magazinereported. She is required to report her spending to a federal court.

Before her husband was arrested, the Madoffs lived lavishly in aManhattan penthouse and two mansions, one of them in Palm Beach County. The Palm Beach seven-bedroom waterfront house sold after the feds listed a $6.5 million asking price. An auction of the mansion's contents yielded $500,000 earlier this summer. Proceeds went to a fund to compensate Bernard Madoff's victims.

CBSNews reported this week Ruth Madoff is creating a new life for herself and that she has not visited her husband since the December suicide of their son, Mark. Ruth Madoff is trying to reconcile with her other son Andrew, according to Diana Henriques, the biographer of Bernard Madoff, who appeared on CBS' The Early Show.

"For all practical purposes, the Madoff marriage was split apart by that 150-year prison sentence that will keep Madoff behind bars for the rest of his life,'' Henriques said. "So my sense is that Ruth is now focusing all her efforts on rebuilding a relationship with her surviving son, Andrew, and her grandchildren.''

She has been living with her sister, 73, and brother-in-law Robert, 76, who lost their own savings by investing with Bernard Madoff, according to The New York Post.The Romans have been driving neighbors around for extra cash, The Post recently reported. The Romans operate their business out of their condo to ferry passengers to airports, delis and malls.

"They lost everything. They almost lost their house," a neighbor told the Post. "They do odds and ends to get by.

"They run a shuttle service to the airport. Some people here use it. And they do the driving. I've seen Joan at 5 a.m. going to work."

One of the Romans' neighbors declined to talk to the Sun Sentinel about Ruth Madoff. Telephone calls to the Romans went unanswered.